Chris Selley: The election no one predicted

OK. Cards on the table, Canadians. It turns out we don’t really know much about what the heck you’re thinking.

What Compas pollster Conrad Winn deemed Sunday as “the most bizarre, unstable, upside-down election since Confederation” has yielded a once-unthinkable result: Jack Layton’s New Democrats have roared from seemingly permanent third-party status to Official Opposition in waiting. As I write this, CBC is projecting 106 seats for the NDP — 63 more than the previous high-water under Ed Broadbent in the 1980s. That surge was about Free Trade, give or take. If anyone knows for sure what this surge was about, they’re keeping quiet .

Oh, yeah. And the Conservatives finally won their majority. As I write this, deep in the bowels of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, it’s definitely taking some of the wind out of the NDP supporters’ sails.

Nobody saw this coming until the polls started to shift in the wake of the debates. And it took another week before anyone thought it was anything other than the traditional NDP bump. It seems like a lifetime ago, but was in fact only a few short weeks ago that received wisdom held the New Democrats wanted no part of an election. There was Mr. Layton’s cancer treatment, his broken hip, the party’s unpromising position in the polls. When the government tabled a budget specifically tailored to attract NDP support, the ranks of “Team 2012” — political junkies who felt we’d avoid an election this year — swelled.

Then, suddenly, Mr. Layton was bounding about Canada like … well, like a man who hadn’t had cancer treatment and a broken hip. His twirled his cane like he’d been worse off without it. People followed him like a conga line.

This made some sense in Quebec. Mr. Layton had been playing a long game there, crafting nationalist-friendly policies that stood him in good stead when the Bloc collapsed. But the Bloc still had to collapse as badly as the Progressive Conservatives in 1993, and nobody saw that coming either.

But outside Quebec? Well, since Mr. Layton took over in 2003, the party has become vastly more professional, slick and methodical in pursuing the voters it needs. But that was true in 2008 and 2006, and the party’s gains, while meaningful, were a fraction of this. Since the surge began, people have been picking over the NDP platform in search of clues; some feel it struck the perfect balance between appealing to the base and attracting fretful middle-agers worried about both their kids and their retirements.

Could be. But at its root, this was a standard-issue NDP campaign: More generous EI and CPP, more doctors and nurses, cap and trade, renewable energy, cultural and economic protectionism, incentives against non-local and genetically modified foods, help for foreign-trained professionals, troops out of Afghanistan, proportional representation of some sort, abolishing the Senate. You’d have to pay mighty close attention to the minor differences from previous platforms to be bowled over by it.

Whatever happened, this astonishing result portends certain ironies. For one thing, it might not have been possible if Canadians were as scared of a Stephen Harper majority as they used to be. The traditional late-days exodus of NDP voters to the Liberals seems not to have transpired this year. Perhaps people were just fed up with him instead, thus liberating them to vote, very understandably, against the status quo. And it led to what they said they feared most.

Was it worth it? “Yes and no,” Sid Ryan, president of the Ontario Federation of Labour, told me Monday night. “We’ve needed to put a stake in the heart of the Liberal party for decades. They’ve been preventing us from presenting an alternative left-of-centre vision. They’ve been occupying the mushy middle for too many years.”

Indeed, there’s a huge upside for the New Democrats here. If they and the Liberals — remember them? — combined had ended up with more seats than the Conservatives, there would have been a huge incentive to jump feet first into government. That’s somewhere the federal New Democrats have never been. The best way for them to turn this astonishing result into something permanent might just be four years of diligent, party-building work in opposition. They’ll also have “a s—tload of money” coming their way, as Mr. Ryan inelegantly points out — to build the infrastructure in Quebec they’ll need going forward, for example.

This is a terrific result for Canadian democracy. If the Liberals are to continue on as a political party, they must now confront the black hole where their raison d’être used to be. No more coats of spackle and parachute leaders. Rebuild for real or go away. The Conservatives, meanwhile, get to show us just what they’ll do with a majority. And if turns out to be less awful than New Democrats and Liberals have traditionally suspected, and they’re willing to admit it, our polity will be incalculably healthier for it.